Guest Editor’s Note

When I was one month away from giving birth to my first child, I was quietly winding down all major projects in preparation for this new embarkation toward parenthood. My feet were so swollen I was wearing my husband’s size eleven sneakers, my nose spread wide, and my general disposition was that of a complete menace: the third trimester did not agree with my usually diplomatic countenance. I was sitting in a cinder block office with terrible lighting, curious as to why the Poetry Foundation asked to have a video call. I assumed they wanted me to judge a prize or participate in an event.

Instead of an ask, I was bestowed a gift: I was invited to join a lineage of poets who advocate for poetry by and for young people. I was dumbfounded on that call. And I also knew that given the huge life changes ahead, my responsibilities were going to have to be ultra-focused. As I was considering the different kinds of projects I could pursue, I kept returning to a call that had gone out a few years before from my predecessors Margarita Engle, Jacqueline Woodson, and Naomi Shihab Nye for their special issue of Poetry for young people, published in March 2021. I wanted my tenure as Young People’s Poet Laureate to leave something tangible behind, something we could hold with our hands and return to again; an artifact that could exist in classrooms and juvenile detention facilities and hospitals and on living room coffee tables. I wanted to be of service in this highly specific way: to foster a gathering of poems that would be intergenerational, fresh and wise, funny and poignant, clear and new as the morning after rain. I wanted to seek poems that highlight and honor the rites of passage that usher young people toward maturity. This issue for young people, which includes poems written by young people, was where I wanted to pour all my energy.

And so, in early 2024, I put out a call for submissions. With help from the committed staff at Poetry, and with Denice Frohman, Yesenia Montilla, Alexa Patrick, and Tatiana Figueroa Ramírez—all of whom are poets, teaching artists, and community builders—we read through hundreds of poems in search of work that spoke to the young people in all of us.

Young adulthood is unique for many reasons, not the least of which is the transference of agency that happens as a child, previously reliant on their parents or caregivers, becomes a more capable young adult. The young person encounters their first job, their first serious crush, their first time traveling alone, their first time attending a funeral or a wedding or a party where everyone else seems to know the dance steps of social interactions better than they do. And, of course, there are a myriad of other firsts singular to geographical location, family expectation, and cultural expression, as well as each individual human experience.

Although I originally imagined each poem in this issue would focus on a first time, my goal was not to be prescriptive, but instead to offer a loose tether to the issue. When I read the poems that made their way through multiple readers, I was so moved. Here are poems that call back to losing loved ones, that consider grief and wonder; poems that lasso the first bubble-burst of innocence, that encounter the sharpened edge of growing up. Here are poems that soothe nostalgia, or hone it into jagged longing. This issue contains works by youth poets laureate, National Book Award–longlisted writers, the incoming Young People’s Poet Laureate, teachers, students, folks in MFA programs, and folks grinding, doing activist work, and making different kinds of art—so many kinds of writers, from different walks of life, using different forms and approaches to reflect on childhood and young adulthood.

I am so grateful that I could help usher this collection of writing and illustration into being. I am beyond honored that hundreds upon hundreds of writers trusted us with their poems, each one of them writing toward our single shared experience: growing up, and the many ways it pains us and propels us toward what is green and dewdrop possible. Thank you, writers, and thank you, readers, for gathering in these pages. May they serve. Axé.